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Trump’s corrupt pardons

The power of the president to grant pardons as stated in the Constitution is unconditional, as President Donald Trump has observed. But as he prepares to bestow that favor on Roger Stone and perhaps other felons who have protected him, someone should advise him that a corrupt pardon is nevertheless a crime that can be prosecuted, if not overturned.

So Bill Clinton learned soon after he pardoned Marc Rich on the last day of his presidency, Jan. 20, 2001. Public anger exploded within days after Clinton granted a conditional reprieve to the infamous “fugitive financier,” who had skipped to a Swiss chateau, evading trial on charges of tax evasion, sanctions violations and conspiracy. Among those most infuriated by Clinton’s surprise decision were the federal prosecutors who spent years chasing Rich.

Suspicion centered on generous political and charitable donations by Rich’s ex-wife over a period of years to various Clinton campaigns and the Clinton Foundation. Mary Jo White, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, swiftly announced that her office had opened a criminal investigation of Clinton — the president who had appointed her. That probe continued for a few years under the watchful eye of James Comey, chosen by then-President George W. Bush to replace White.

No doubt Comey and his boss, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft — who had voted to convict Clinton in his Senate impeachment trial — would have relished indicting the former president. The investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing, however. Clinton’s actual motive was to reward then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who personally called the Oval Office three times seeking a pardon for Rich in the midst of peace talks with the Palestinians. (As usual, under the “Clinton rules,” the former president’s eventual exoneration went unnoticed in major media outlets.)

But the immediate outrage over Rich’s pardon inflamed media outlets for weeks, setting the stage for both congressional and prosecutorial inquiries. Today the same politicians of both parties who screamed about Clinton are silent.

Have none of them noticed the massive flows of donor money surrounding the Trump pardons? Never mind the blatant influence peddling by former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and various other presidential cronies and supporters. If the Rich donations were suspect, what about the cash poured into Trump’s coffers by those seeking pardons and their advocates?

Dallas Republican donor Doug Deason and his billionaire father gave more than a million dollars to the pro-Trump America First PAC. Their generosity seems to have greased the pardon of David Safavian, a former federal official convicted of obstruction and perjury in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam Adelson, have given more than $200 million to Republican causes, including at least $30 million to Trump-related committees in recent years and $500,000 to a defense fund for Trump aides coping with special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. They asked that Trump pardon junk-bond crook Michael Milken and got their wish. (Mrs. Adelson also got the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

And then there’s the Pogue family, also from Dallas, which forked over $85,000 last year jointly to the president’s reelection committee and the Republican Party — and got a gift-wrapped pardon for its patriarch, Paul Pogue, a construction magnate convicted of tax fraud. Pushing the Pogue pardon was former Sen. Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania Republican who brayed loudly about the Rich case.

If the Trump pardons look sketchy, consider the fact that Trump simply ignored the Justice Department process that is traditionally employed in evaluating such requests. He knows that the law enforcement apparatus headed by Attorney General William Barr will let him abuse his power freely, while perhaps uttering a feeble protest. Or not.

We will soon see how far Trump will go in abusing the pardon authority. He appears to be preparing to do far worse than handing out clemency for cash. The judge who sentenced Roger Stone to almost four years in prison accused the dirty trickster of lying to “protect the president.” When Trump pardons Stone, Paul Manafort and others implicated in the Russia scandal, he will cap the most troubling cover-up in American history.

If Clinton was subject to investigation and possible prosecution, then Trump should be, too.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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As we report in today’s edition, Linda Conlon, Oneida County’s public health officer, has apparently decided the economic hardships brought about by the Evers lockdown weren’t dire enough, so she has now adopted a policy that will surely cause even more economic damage, that is, to name businesses that were visited by persons testing positive for COVID-19.

I was lucky enough to attend the furbearer advisory committee meeting last week. One thing I have to say with all of this “social distancing” protocol is it truly has given me the opportunity to attend several things I may not have otherwise. Whether it is logistically not viable or there are two meetings at the same time, I will admit there have always been several things I wanted to check into, whether for my own personal edification or for the newspaper, that I just simply could not get to.

The recovery stage for our economy is finally here, and now the policy priority has to shift to getting people back on the job and getting businesses up and running. The best incentive to get businesses hiring again and get workers off unemployment is to suspend the payroll tax for the rest of the year.

The coronavirus has sidelined a lot of plans for meetings and conferences, and that’s certainly true when it comes to lake matters. But there’s a plus side to all this: Online meetings have made the sessions more accessible than ever before.

Sports’ movies have been a big hit in Hollywood. Whether fact, fiction or based on a real life event, they are fun to watch. Often inspirational, here are some of my favorites and what I take away from them.

America is starting to reopen for business across the country — except for a handful of states where lockdown orders are expected to remain in place for weeks to come. With very few exceptions, the cities and states that have ordered their businesses to remain comatose and their millions of workers to go without paychecks are blue, blue, blue. This list includes New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, California and Oregon. They all have Democratic governors.

As many know, the fight against terrestrial invasive species has been heating up across the Northwoods (and other areas, of course). The Chequamegon Nicolet National Forest (CNNF) recently came out with its update of the non-native plant plan from 2005, targeting non-native species and putting special emphasis on some species of concern.

Lake associations generally have slim budgets for projects to sustain or improve water quality and lake ecosystems. It’s even tougher for individual property owners to find money to take on lake enhancement projects, like a natural shoreline restorations.

Usually, when a CEO severely underperforms peers, he or she is fired or handed a gold watch and given a quick retirement party. In the Democratic Party, a rotten performance is a qualification for the presidency.

This week, NASCAR returned for the first time since March 8. The sound of roaring engines and cars zooming by delighted me as I watched on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It made me happy for a number of reasons.

Imagine that for preaching forest fire prevention each state or county was on its own. They had to craft their own messages, create their own materials, handle distribution, and more, all at significant cost. (subscriber access)

Every year I wonder why people do not go to the Wisconsin Conservation Congress (WCC) and Department of Natural Resources (DNR) spring hearings. Every year I wonder why people do not make their voices heard. Even when the option came about to fill out the questionnaire online, turn out was not what I would have expected from such a passionate group of people.

Clean Boats, Clean Waters training sessions have become to some extent casualties of the coronavirus. There likely will be fewer of them, and in Vilas County, for example, attendance will be limited to eight people.

In the strongest terms we can, we endorse Tom Tiffany for Congress in next Tuesday’s election, and urge voters to cast their vote for a representative who we believe will give the Lakeland area and northern Wisconsin a strong voice in Congress — a much more spirited and forceful voice than that of any representative in recent memory.

Lakes and rivers seem to get a lot of “press,” if you will. But wetlands do not get a lot of that attention. UW-Extension Lakes has a series of CLMN (Citizen Lake Monitoring Network) webinars on YouTube now, the most recent of which was all about those wetlands. The webinars are hour-long informational sessions about various aspects of water. (subscriber access)

Your state has many lakes with multiple needs, but a limited amount of money. Where do you spend it? To revive lakes that have become severely impaired? Or to protect those still in excellent condition? Which provides more benefit for the dollar?

As many who read the Outdoors section of The Lakeland Times are aware, the Lakes and Rivers Convention, originally slated to happen at the Holiday Inn and Conference Center in Stevens Point, was turned into an online event. It was still very widely attended, and there were so many great sessions that it was still hard to decide what to attend.

Wednesday April 22 and it’s still cold, like late winter, a pesky white sheet of ice covering the one-third of our lake from the windy point to the Birch Lake Bar, the recent days and nights too chilly to get rid of it.

There will be no graduation festivities this spring at dozens of American colleges and universities, including Ohio State, Brigham Young, Howard, Swarthmore, Notre Dame, Duke, UCLA and Yale. That means this year’s graduates and their closest relatives and friends will not have the benefit of sitting on hard chairs and listening to the commencement speaker.

In our many years of reporting on and analyzing state government, it is hardly an understatement to say that the GOP lawsuit challenging the authority of the Evers administration to unilaterally lockdown this state for another month and contesting the sweeping powers the governor and his health services secretary claim is perhaps the most important of our lives.

It was with total shock, and then a heavy heart, that I read an email Monday morning from our general manager, Heather Holmes. She forwarded an email to me from Jacob Friede’s mom letting us know Jacob’s life had been taken in a boating accident last weekend. I sat, staring at the computer, unsure what to think or how to respond.

We read and hear a lot of impervious surfaces on lake properties and why they are bad for our lakes. A paper from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Center for Land Use Education puts the concern in clear perspective.

To say I love a good murder mystery would be an understatement. From the writings of Agatha Christie to modern authors, there’s something alluring about the prospect of a mystery needing to be solved and finding the clues and piecing it together as you read.

We start with the good news, which you can find here but not in many other media outlets: COVID-19 is not nearly as dangerous as we all thought it once was, nor increasingly does it seem to be so easily transmitted.

It’s no secret COVID-19 has changed the professional sports schedule. Usually there would be baseball, basketball and hockey on right now, in addition to NASCAR, the PGA Tour and other sporting events. Now, everything is different.

Dogs use their amazing noses to help us in many ways. They can sniff our drugs being smuggled across our border, help track down and find missing children, locate people amid wreckage from storms, and do many other things we humans cannot.

There’s nothing quite like an old favorite to lift your spirits and bring some levity to an incredibly stressful. And so, as I was sitting at home looking through some of my favorite films to revisit and do just that, I came across a film I hadn’t seen in years, but always loved.

The evening sun dips into purple above the treetops, casting a mellow light across Birch Lake, where grandson Tucker and I, jig rods in hand, hunch over holes drilled in the ice. No one else is around. Earlier in the day, Tucker (7) walked around the edge of the lake with his mom and dad and dogs Bruce and Pizzy, while younger grandson Perrin (6) and I tended the jig rods.

When Americans are confronting the most threatening national crisis in a generation or more, it would be uplifting to offer a few encouraging words about the president of the United States. And a few is about as many as can be offered at this point. Not only is his performance to date far below what his country needs, but he also shows no sign of having learned the lessons that might allow him to improve.

With many Northwoods residents stuck inside, or staying home, we are all looking for more things to do at home and more ways to stay occupied. While I have always enjoyed gardening, I can say with a degree of confidence, that I am not the best at it. But I think that is part of the beauty of gardening. You do not really have to be “good” at it to enjoy it. My situation has changed over the years, meaning I have had different soil types to deal with, I have had to create gardens out of lawns and other areas, and I have, most recently, had to downsize quite a bit.

With everything changing in our lives, seemingly by the day, it is comforting to know we can still do things to bring a touch of normalcy to our lives. As of this writing, and I for one expect it will continue, we can all still go fishing.

Last Friday afternoon I sat on the lakefront screen porch, needing only a fleece for warmth, and listened as the melt water from the roof hit the leaves on the ground below. It was a lovely sound after a snow melt that had been agonizingly slow, highs in the upper 30s, low 40s at best, and back to well below freezing overnight, the decline in snow all but imperceptible.

“Heresy” by Melissa Lenhardt is a western. There will be mayhem, shootouts and standoffs. There will be horseback races, whiskey and tired cowboys at the end of the day. Cattlerustlers who need to be set straight. The only difference? Women get all the action in this novel.

People are busy these days, rarely finding time to themselves. The short “By The Way” devotional radio segment, broadcast throughout the United States and beyond, changes that for those who chose to listen.

This is a bewildering and stressful time around the world, but it was even more bewildering and stressful in Wisconsin this week as voters marched to the polls, or in many cases didn’t, to cast ballots in the state’s spring elections — elections that should have been postponed.

I am like a kid in a candy store when I have a new field guide. I love them, and there are so many of them out there. Enthusiasts can find field guides dedicated to plants, animals, insects, fish and any other thing, truly, that may be of interest. A field guide to edible plants is always fun to flip through. But I have to say there are some I will likely never try. Mushrooming is huge with some people, but I do not know enough about it to feel safe just picking up a field guide and heading out into the woods.

I should have written this column a month ago, since February 2 was World Wetlands Day. The topic is also timely because the Oneida County Board on February 18 voted to reduce the setback for grading near wetlands from 15 feet to 5 feet.

I have never been one to understand it, to be honest. People are fond of saying, “we get an extra hour of daylight!” Or “we are losing an hour of daylight!” My question is: how many hours a day do you sleep? Are you awake at all in the morning or evening? Because there really is not that much difference in the amount of daylight we get that next day. It is adjusted — with time being a construct of humanity to keep things orderly.

Why in the world is the federal government, 20 years into the 21st century, continuing to pour tens of billions of tax dollars into little-used mass transit rail projects? In a digital age with increasingly popular and affordable door-to-door ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft, universal use of cars by all income groups and the revolution of smart driverless vehicles around the corner, subway systems and light rail are as old-fashioned as the rotary phone. The federal government and urban planners in at least 25 cities are frantically spending money to lay down tracks that, in 10 or 20 years, they will have to rip right out of the ground.

The recent decision by Oneida County circuit judge Michael Bloom to dismiss the walking quorum complaint against Rhinelander mayor Chris Frederickson and four city aldermen is a case study demonstrating both how good-old-boy politics still dominates in Oneida County and how the state’s activist judges are, case by case, rewriting the state’s open meetings and open records laws.

As we report today, the Minocqua town board recently fired public works employee Mark Heil after only about a week as a full-time employee, though he had been employed part-time since last October.
Specifically, Heil was fired for using a town front-end loader to plow a private driveway on Church Road, in violation of town policy.

First, a confession: I really like presidential debates. Why, you ask? Because these debates give us voters the chance to watch and evaluate the candidates while they stand shoulder-to-shoulder and have to answer the same questions. Away from their carefully orchestrated campaign events, without their teleprompters or an audience of planted, friendly supporters, candidates in a debate are under pressure and facing criticism from both opponents and moderators.

There’s an old saying about baseball and life that no one ever had a 1.000 batting average. It turns out that’s not exactly true. At least when it comes to the Trump economy, anti-Trumpers defied the near-impossible statistical odds and somehow have batted 1.000 on their predictions. They managed to get it wrong every time.

At a recent county public hearing to consider a hotel project planned for Hwy. 51 where once stood the Bay View Inn and a laundromat, the project’s developer, Glenn Schiffmann, who was obviously exasperated, said what many in the room must have been thinking: There’s just too much government.
We agree with Mr. Schiffmann and we are just as exasperated.

In the seven presidential elections since 1992, the Republican presidential nominee has won the popular vote exactly once. The lone GOP candidate to receive a majority of the national vote was George W. Bush in 2004. Bush’s election-day victory over Democrat John Kerry, who had, in most observers’ views, “won” the debates between the two, was explained by the respected Democratic pollster Peter Hart: “Voters preferred I Like over IQ.”

As on the Republican side, the Democratic primary for the seventh congressional district this coming Tuesday — the winners will face each other in May to determine who replaces Republican Sean Duffy as our representative in Congress — offers a clear choice.
That choice is Tricia Zunker, the president of the Wausau school board and an associate justice on the Ho-Chunk Nation Supreme Court.

The Republican and Democratic primaries for the seventh congressional district are Tuesday — the winners will face each other in May to determine who replaces Republican Sean Duffy as our representative in Congress — and in both parties the choice is straightforward and clear.
On the Republican side, we believe voters should nominate Northwoods state Sen. Tom Tiffany as the best candidate for northern Wisconsin.

In a story in last Friday’s edition, Minocqua town chairman Mark Hartzheim was quoted as saying he could not remember roads being in as poor a shape as they are right now.
He’s not alone. Everyone knows it. Everyone talks and complains about it. The problem is, no one is doing much about it.

President Donald Trump rightly touts the economy-wide savings from his deregulation initiatives. But one federal agency didn’t get the memo. Some members of the Surface Transportation Board, which has oversight over the nation’s network of freight railroads, wants to resurrect price controls on the industry.

After President Trump finished his triumphant State of the Union speech Tuesday night, House speaker Nancy Pelosi did something no one was anticipating: She stood up and ripped apart the printed copy of the speech, calling it a manifesto of untruths.

After President Trump finished his triumphant State of the Union speech Tuesday night, House speaker Nancy Pelosi did something no one was anticipating: She stood up and ripped apart the printed copy of the speech, calling it a manifesto of untruths.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, President Donald Trump again talked positively about negative interest rates. That’s not a very good idea considering negative interest rates are a warning signal of deflation, which can be as bad for an economy as runaway inflation.

It’s a rough start to the year 2020.
Politically, the nation, at least its major media, seems to be consumed by ongoing attempts to remove President Trump from office, and, in general, political polarization has reached ever new heights around the world, from Brexit in Britain to Hong Kong protests.

For those who wanted Oneida County to borrow up to $2 million from the state Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL) to fund some pretty important capital improvement projects, Tuesday was a bitter blow to their big-government dreams.

We have reached that time in every presidential nominating year when distinguished, national opinion leaders beat up on Iowa and that admirable state’s influential role in determining the two major parties’ eventual presidential nominees and, therefore, the next president.

Almost all of us know (because President Trump boasts of it in nearly every speech) that our 3.5% unemployment rate has reached a 50-year low. But this official decline in joblessness doesn’t tell the entire story of the improvement in the job market in the United States. And it doesn’t fully capture the change in direction between what happened under President Barack Obama and Trump.

Over the holidays, I read Elton John’s biography, “Me.” He writes about his friendship with Freddie Mercury, the ultratalented lead singer of the rock group Queen. Mercury tragically died of AIDS at the age of 45 in 1991. Mercury was one of the last people to die of the disease in Britain during the epidemic years.

It was a sweet and important win for the average person and for accountability when, as we report in today’s edition, cable giant CNN agreed last week to settle a defamation suit filed by Kentucky high school student Nick Sandmann, who counterpunched against the network for painting him as a racist.

What President Donald Trump said to the nation about the prospect of war with Iran impressed many listeners far less than the way he said it — or slurred it. Unlike the manipulated video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that made her appear drunk, Trump delivered a live speech that made him sound impaired.

Is anyone here old enough to remember the urgent warning issued in a speech to the National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 by an American vice president who had artfully avoided the military draft during wartime?

Remember the good old days when politicians talked about policy?
It seems like such a long time ago, but back in the day elections actually turned on what policy positions candidates took, and whether incumbents had lived up to their promises.

The American president, in addition to serving as commander in chief, is expected to be this nation’s consoler in chief, as well as the nation’s teacher and even preacher. Who alive on Jan. 28, 1986, does not remember the words of then-President Ronald Reagan from the Oval Office following the explosion of the Challenger that killed all seven astronauts on board, seen live on television by millions?

This past month we have been awash in various studies abut the efficacy of industrial clusters — those focused government efforts to provide tax breaks and other financial incentives sufficient to boost a particular industry in a particular place — so it’s time to weigh in about the potential effects of these clusters on northern Wisconsin.

The spirit of goodwill can take us by surprise this season, without respect to religion (or even politics). And while such a moment may not quite become an epiphany, it can still make us think again about our lives and times. Which is what happened to me over the weekend before Christmas.

Although I qualify for the senior discount at the movies, even I’m not old enough to have met Heraclitus, the wise Greek who lived some 25 centuries ago and whom we can thank for the timeless wisdom “Character is destiny.”
Here in Washington, one elected national leader commands the affection and the respect of her constituents.

Actually, it’s always the season for liberal folly, but these cheerless folks have given us a bounty during this holiday, for their single issue — impeachment — is a gift to conservatives that likely will keep on giving right through next November.

Our sources are telling us that President Trump is nearing a decision on how to revive the all-but-dormant American uranium industry. This proposed plan would create a reserve of domestically mined uranium stored in a “Federal Uranium Security Stockpile.” One option on the table is for the Department of Defense to purchase uranium through the 1950 Defense Production Act.

When President Donald Trump’s defenders aren’t simply lying about the House impeachment inquiry — it all happened in a Capitol Hill basement with no Republicans present, as one of his lawyers told National Public Radio — they complain about the lack of firsthand witnesses to presidential abuse. They assume nobody will notice that Trump himself forbid any testimony by those with the most direct knowledge of his attempts to extort Ukraine.

Sen. Rand Paul just wrote a book, “The Case Against Socialism.”
I thought that case was already decided, since socialist countries failed so spectacularly. But the idea hasn’t died, especially amongst the young.

It’s almost — almost — hard to remember all the abuses enacted against the people of Wisconsin more than a decade ago by the administrative state during the regime of Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and his bureaucratic allies.

Whenever President Donald Trump is caught doing wrong, he answers with categorical denial and a fervent claim that he was wronged. Almost since the day he won election in November 2016, that is how Trump and his minions in politics and media have sought to obscure the glaring and indecent fact that he was sponsored by a Russian dictator who remains deeply hostile to our country.

The Trump administration reached a deal with House Democrats this week over a new trade agreement to replace the dreaded NAFTA, and, assuming the deal holds up and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is ratified, it deserves two cheers.

Why are Democrats Sen. Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi teaming together to lobby for a tax bill that would provide about 80% of the benefits to Americans who make more than $100,000 a year?

Nobody on Capitol Hill rants more fervently about imaginary conspiracies than Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and devoted congressional promoter of Trumpian nonsense.

Washington do-goodism almost always fails to help the people it is supposed to because politicians ignore the Law of Unintended Consequences. Nowhere is that more evident than when it comes to a congressional plan to put payday lenders and other short-term lending institutions, such as the burgeoning online lenders, out of business.

Hollywood is now obsessing about increasing ethnic and gender diversity. Good. There’s been nasty racial and gender discrimination in the movie business.
Unfortunately, Hollywood has no interest in one type of diversity: diversity of thought.

In listening to the Democratic presidential debates, we might conclude that “Medicare for All” is a legislative possibility. It is not, and any presidential candidate with a scintilla of self-respect must admit that fact.

Only a week ago we opined in these pages about the terrible state of open government in the Northwoods, in Wisconsin, and indeed across the entire country. We wrote then that open government was in trouble, with a capital T, and we still believe it is.

We begin this week by quoting the words of the immortal Harold Hill in “The Music Man”:
“Friend, either you’re closing your eyes To a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated …. Well, ya got trouble, my friend, right here, I say, trouble right here in River City.”
Well, to echo the fictional professor Hill, we’ve got big trouble in Wisconsin, and it’s worse and later than most people think.

Every single plausible Democratic candidate for president has endorsed tax increases as a centerpiece of their economic agenda. Think about what we are hearing from Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and the rest of the “Punch and Judy” show: new wealth taxes, carbon taxes, energy taxes, higher death and income taxes with rates up to 70%. Payroll taxes would rise to pay for Social Security benefit expansions and Medicare for All.

Instead of watching Fox News, which manufactures heroic propaganda about President Donald Trump, Republican voters could learn much more from seeing a few hours of Russian television. It is on shows broadcast from Moscow and St. Petersburg where the truth about the Trump administration can be heard.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has impressive credentials: He graduated third in his class from Los Amigos High School in California’s Orange County before winning an appointment from his congressman — “B-1 Bob” Dornan, a conservative remembered for his unstinting support for the California-built U.S. supersonic aircraft — to the United States Military Academy.

The Democratic Party has not functioned as a serious policy organization for a long time now, and this week’s political stunt — otherwise known as Tony Evers’ special session to address gun violence — only proves the point.

The 1994 funeral of former Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill was truly memorable. To the same North Cambridge, Mass., church, St. John the Evangelist — where O’Neill was baptized as an infant and had married his beloved Millie — came two former U.S. Presidents, George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford, scores of senators and members of congress. But more important to O’Neill, also filling the pews were nurses, waitresses, firefighters and nuns.

Once again, Oneida County district attorney Michael Schiek has delivered an open meetings decision that is impressive in its lack of clarity, a mangled mishmash of gobbledygook that is epic in its unintelligibility and abstruseness.

Joe Biden is at it again — living in his own parallel universe. The same former vice president who says that his son Hunter was hired by a Ukrainian oil and gas company because of his expertise in energy policy is now claiming President Donald Trump has “squandered” the strong Obama economy he inherited.

Congressional Republicans don’t want to debate President Donald Trump’s attempt to extort political prosecutions of Americans from Ukraine — and given the damning facts emerging every day, their reluctance is understandable, if not honorable.

Last week, the lobbying arm of the wind energy industry made an unsurprising, though somewhat embarrassing, announcement. It wants a longer lifeline with federal subsidies. So much for wind being the low-cost energy source of the future.

Student loan debt keeps growing.
There is a better solution than the ones politicians offer, which stick the taxpayer or the loan lenders with the whole bill and it’s called an “income share agreement.”

As Oneida County gets ready to take up its 2020 draft budget next month, it’s clear that most Oneida County supervisors, with a few notable exceptions such as supervisor Billy Fried, are just content to ignore all the fiscal red flags around them.

Perhaps it was the exception that proves the rule, but this past week the Oneida County Board of Supervisors made a wise decision — for once — when it rejected an outright prohibition on mining on county-owned lands.

On the same day the White House plunged the nation into a constitutional crisis by refusing to provide witnesses or documents to House Democrats conducting an impeachment inquiry, word leaked of a new member on the Trump legal defense team.

While running for president in 1960, John F. Kennedy campaigned against the moderate growth economy (2.5% annual GDP rise) in the last years of the Eisenhower administration. He appealed to Americans’ highest aspirations by saying in his typical Boston drawl: “We can do bettah.”

Not only is Joe Biden innocent of any wrongdoing in Ukraine — as almost every legitimate news organization now acknowledges — but his actions concerning his son’s business interests there were precisely the opposite of the smears launched against him by the Trump campaign.

A friend of mine’s third grade daughter came home from school a few weeks ago with tears streaming down her cheeks. “My teacher says we only have 10 years before the oceans rise and we are underwater,” she moaned. “Are we all going to die?”
That’s a heavy burden to place on the shoulders of a 9-year-old.

In comments made at this week’s Rhinelander city council meeting, Oneida County Economic Development Corporation executive director Stacey Johnson offered up a full-throated defense of city council member and former Oneida County detective sergeant Ryan Rossing, who has been enmeshed in issues surrounding honesty and secrecy, including litigation about an alleged walking quorum stemming from a complaint by this newspaper.

Americans have good reason to suspect Donald Trump of committing various and serious crimes, but they have no immediate means to hold him accountable. Rising frustration over this malefactor’s impunity was only exacerbated by the latest House Judiciary Committee hearings, which featured two empty chairs and an insolent, prevaricating witness named Corey Lewandowski.

The recent threats by Beijing to cut off American access to critical mineral imports has many Americans wondering why our politicians have allowed the United States to become so overly dependent on China for these valued resources in the first place.

When it comes to brain injuries, it is said that the accumulation of small hits to the head are actually more damaging than concussions in causing neurodegenerative disease, and the same might be said of political and economic injury, that the accumulation of small slights can be more devastating to a region’s prosperity than one major political assault.

Eighteen years ago, on a terrible day every American then living remembers too well, Rudolph Giuliani earned respect for his calm, inspiring and unifying leadership of a wounded New York City. Too much has happened since then to feel anything but disappointment in him, but on this year’s 9/11 anniversary, the man once known as “America’s Mayor” descended to a new and ominous low.

With most services, you get to shop around, but rarely can you do that with government-run schools.
Philadelphia mom Elaine Wells was upset to learn that there were fights every day in the school her son attended. So she walked him over to another school.

Back when Richard Nixon was president, a Washington saloon five minutes’ walk from the White House named the Class Reunion was the go-to watering hole where press, politicians and real people could rub and bend elbows. To be candid, I was a regular at “the CR,” as it was called, but frankly went there more for the uniquely bipartisan conversation and good-natured needling, which were the hallmarks of the place.

Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has previewed his campaign against Joe Biden, still apparently the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2020. “Joe isn’t playing with a full deck of cards,” barked Trump with his usual grace and originality, after the former vice president said something awkward about “poor kids” and “white kids.”

This week, as we report in today’s edition, The Times has filed an open-meetings complaint against two supervisors, Robb Jensen and Jack Sorensen, for what we believe to be talking out of turn at a recent meeting, in which they took it upon themselves to plug a new $10-million-plus expense for county taxpayers, namely, a new county highway department facility.

One of the many idiocies of the “Green New Deal” and other such anti-fossil fuel crusades is that all of this arrives on the political scene at a time when the price of producing energy from fossil fuels is lower than at any time before in human history.

Back about 1740, when a potato famine hit Ireland, a prominent philanthropist in the Irish village of Maynooth decided to do something good for starving village farmers: she put them to work building a gigantic and ornate stone structure, and paid them by giving them food for free.

The long anticipated audit of the Oneida-Vilas Transit Commission is in, and, as expected, the company performing the audit, known Wipfli, found no condemnations or misconduct that would result in blaring headlines.

Mr. Moore got it both right and wrong in his column “Partying like there’s no tomorrow.”
He got it right, that a lot of rich people hastening to hold a meeting on an island in their private jets and yachts appears hypocritical when their mode of transportation burns so much more fossil fuel than do average people’s cars. However, he got his “alternative facts” wrong on climate change.

After the massacres in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, we watched Donald Trump, the president who spends most of his time on social media to divide and polarize America, speak up for national unity and an end to “destructive partisanship.” From the White House he issued a statement condemning white supremacy and bigotry as “evil.” And even if his voice droned as he read the teleprompter, people wanted to believe he meant what he said.

Back in the day, when kids caught their parents doing something those parents had told them it was wrong for people to do, the parents had a ready answer:
“Don’t do as we do,” the thundering command would come. “Do as we say do!”

Do we want the U.S. Federal Reserve Board to operate as a commercial bank — and compete with our private banking system? The Fed apparently wants to, and it’s a policy shift that could greatly expand the mission of the Fed.

For some time now, those who question the nation’s vaccination schedule — the potential for some 69 recommended doses by the age of 18, with sometimes as many as five vaccines at once for young children — have pointed to the nation’s vaccine court and its staggering compensation numbers to prove that vaccinations can have deadly effects.

Robert Mueller’s testimony disappointed anyone seeking drama, but his performance isn’t the problem. What keeps congressional Democrats from fulfilling their constitutional duty to confront a lawless president is their own political inertia.

Finally, we seem to have a bipartisan consensus in Washington. Both parties are terrified of new private money, and they want to regulate it out of existence. The near universal fear and loathing by government officials of these so-called cryptocurrencies is all the more reason they should exist.

Even though they went to great lengths in their decision to downplay its ramifications, the U.S. Supreme Court made a historic ruling earlier this month that governments must pay property owners before they take their property, or at the time they do so, or they have violated the property owner’s constitutional rights.

No, we haven’t gone crazy — readers will notice that there is an asterisk on the headline. The asterisk is: As a general rule, that’s a terribly bad idea.
However, in reading surveys about the county’s fiscal future turned in by Oneida County department heads, it turns out they have some good ideas, here and there.

As someone who was lucky enough to cover the 1992 presidential campaign — involving Republican incumbent President George W. Bush, Democratic challenger Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and the independent maverick, Texas billionaire businessman Ross Perot — from start to finish, allow me to make one semi-important point: Perot was not at all like anybody else who would, allegedly as a billionaire businessman, run for the White House as the GOP nominee — successfully — in 2016.

A century ago, newspapers employed more than 2,000 full-time editorial cartoonists. Today, there are fewer than 25. In the United States, political cartooning as we know it is dead. If you draw them for a living and you have any brains, you’re working in a different field or looking for an exit.

In signing the new state budget, Gov. Tony Evers vetoed out grants totaling $250,000 over the next biennium for the Lakeland STAR School/Academy. (Full disclosure: Gregg Walker is the publisher of The Lakeland Times and is president of the Lakeland STAR governance board.)

The city of Dunedin, Fla., wants Jim Ficken’s home.
Ficken’s mom died, so he went to South Carolina to take care of her estate. He asked a friend to look after his house.
But then the friend died, and no one cut Ficken’s grass. When it grew to 10 inches, Dunedin officials started fining him $500 a day.
The fine is now about $30,000.

In the first Democratic presidential debates, Sen. Kamala Harris of California defended forced busing back in the 1970s as a civil rights triumph and criticized former Vice President Joe Biden for racial insensitivity for once opposing the policy.

The Congressional Budget Office has just released its mid-year update on the federal fiscal situation, and it portends a debt avalanche. But don’t bother to tell Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren that. They’re busy advocating tens of trillions of dollars in new federal spending.

At least three score years ago, my savvy precinct committeewoman impressed upon me an immutable political truth: Every election is not about the candidate(s); no, every election is about the voters ... and about the future. I’m relieved that my precinct committeewoman was not around to hear the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates spend four hours of network TV time talking about each other and about themselves and very little about the voters.

It’s always nice to have a conservative state Supreme Court — that’s elected, by the way — to serve as a check on other, more liberal elected officials, notably our governor, and, far too often, the GOP-dominated Legislature.

Oneida County is without peers when it comes to zoning overregulation, and it most certainly is without peers when it comes to regulating piers — it is one of the only Wisconsin counties to do so, if not the only one.

Presidential candidates and the media keep telling people “it’s immoral” that a few rich people have so much more money than everyone else.
They talk as if it doesn’t matter what the rich did to get the money. Instead, the fact that they are rich is itself immoral.

And around and around they go, the Oneida-Vilas Transit Commission and the Oneida County Board of Supervisors.
Oneida County supervisors keep asking questions, the transit commission keeps resisting (though it claims otherwise), then Oneida County supervisors vote to allow them to borrow money anyway, even though they are not sure the transit operation is functional or even on the up-and-up.
Then they do it all over again the very next year. What a carnival.